Parent Academies: Time Up Front Saves Time in the Future

One thing that we quickly realized when we entered the world of blended learning was that parents could easily feel disconnected from our classroom. No longer were paper worksheets and tests coming home in backpacks. Even our tech savvy parents were unable to easily gauge where they students were in regards to grades and achievement. It became abundantly clear that we could either spend extra personal time at the start of the year helping parents to understand how to navigate our classroom (we hosted these events without any time or monetary compensation) , or we would spend the remainder of the year trying to individually explain to our 100+ parents how their child was performing. We decided to host a series of “Parent Academies”. These classes were offered in the evenings to help accommodate working parents’ schedules. While optional, parents were highly encouraged to attend. We chose to focus each academy on a specific topic and tried to time the information to help the parents when they would most need it. While certainly not a perfect fix, the academies did help bridge the gap for our parents between the classroom experience they had and the one their children are currently experiencing.

Here are some of the presentations we have used for our parent academies:

BLC Jumpstart Parent Academy

The Home/School Connection

The Grading Monster

We are now working on delivering the information in a more “flipped” format with videos. It is so hard to find a time that is convenient for busy families. We are hoping that all parents will be able to view the videos on their own schedule to get the information they need.

4 thoughts on “Parent Academies: Time Up Front Saves Time in the Future

  1. I love this idea but I fear I wouldn’t see many of my parents. If I see two parents during Open House, I had a stellar night. Increasing parental involvement is one of our goals but we haven’t found much success yet.

    • Wow! I can’t even I imagine. We have amazing parent involvement and don’t even have enough slots for parent/teacher conferences. Of course, increased parent involvement does lead to increased parent time requirements but I still think I’ll take that over uninvolved parents.

  2. I love this idea! Our school has hosted a few parent academies for common core standards and other changes. We do use an open gradebook already, but I feel with the changes to google classroom and other tech features, it may be a good idea to increase these academies. Occasionally, parents do not use these academies appropriately and come ready to argue or complain instead of learn and try to understand. Do you see the parents using these meeting times effectively and actually take some positive things away?

    • I do think our parents have all come with good intentions (knock on wood! (: ) Just like our students, our parents all come with different skill sets and some need additional support after the trainings.

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